The final New York Times/Siena polls of the 2026 campaign are out, and they put Democrats ahead in every one of the seven Senate races surveyed — Michigan by 11 points, Texas by 7, Maine by 6, Ohio and Kansas by 5 each, Alaska by 2, and Iowa virtually tied. The polls, released Sunday, are the last numbers voters will see before Tuesday's midterms decide who controls the Senate.
The full Senate figures, among likely voters: in Michigan, Abdul El-Sayed leads Mike Rogers 53 percent to 42. In Texas, James Talarico leads Ken Paxton 50 to 43. In Maine, Troy Jackson leads Senator Susan Collins 51 to 45. In Ohio, Sherrod Brown leads Senator Jon Husted 49 to 44. In Kansas, Adam Hamilton leads Senator Roger Marshall 49 to 44, with Libertarian David Graham at 4. In Alaska, Mary Peltola leads Senator Dan Sullivan 48 to 46. And in Iowa, Josh Turek leads Ashley Hinson 48 to 47.
Six of those seven seats are held by Republicans; Michigan is the open seat Democrats are defending. If every one of these leads held on Tuesday, Democrats would take the Senate. The pollster itself will not go that far. Don Levy, executive director of the Siena Research Institute, said a Democratic majority is "a distinct possibility" on these numbers — but that "a Senate majority for either party remains possible," and that it is time for "the counts to speak louder than the polls." The same surveys also show Democrats leading the governor's races in Alaska, Iowa, Maine and Michigan by 8 points or more, Ohio's Amy Acton ahead of Vivek Ramaswamy by 6, and the Kansas and Texas governor's races too close to call.
The margins matter, because on the polls' own terms most of these races are ties. The margin of error runs from plus or minus 3.4 points in Texas to 5.0 in Alaska. Only two of the seven Senate leads — Michigan's 11 points and Texas's 7 — are bigger than the error margin of the poll that produced them. The other five sit inside it. The surveys were taken from October 23 to November 1, among likely voters in each state.
So the numbers are now on the record, and Tuesday is the test of them. Polls are surveys, not votes, and they have missed before: the Times' own analyst Nate Cohn has written that in Republican-leaning states polls have often overestimated Democrats, and that leading in polls is not the same thing as winning in November. If these final numbers are right, a blue wave is coming. If they are wrong — above all in states like Texas, Kansas and Ohio, where they show Democrats winning ground Republicans have held for decades — the miss will be there in print for every voter to measure against the real count. Either way, the proof does not come from another poll. It comes on Tuesday.
For voters, that is the use of publishing the figures plainly now: anyone can hold this list against Tuesday night's returns, state by state, and judge for themselves whether the pollsters measured the country or missed it. A family deciding how much to trust the next headline number deserves that check — and this time, the check takes one day.
📰 ProfiloPolitics Member News — choose your news, share it, earn credit: https://white-curlew-963569.hostingersite.com
Join ProfiloPolitics on Telegram
Get the news as it breaks — follow our Telegram channel for every story, first.
Follow @profilopoliticsnews